kevin parks wrote:
<div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">I am doing some simple things with sets and so far have had a lot of success with python's built-in sets, which is such a great new(ish) "batteries included" type python data type.

-------- [snip] -------- [snip] -------------- [snip] -------- [snip] ------
#!/usr/bin/env python

def test():
    x = range(10)
    y = range(5, 15)
    z = range(8, 22)
    setx = set(x)
    sety = set(y)
    setz = set(z)
    print "\n", "x = ", x, "\n", "y = ", y, "\n", "z = ", z, "\n" * 2
    overlap1 = setx.intersection(sety)
    overlap1 = sorted(list(overlap1))
    print "overlap of x and y:", overlap1
    #
    overlap2 = sety.intersection(setz)
    overlap2 = sorted(list(overlap2))
    print "overlap of y and z:", overlap2
    #
    overlap3 = setx.intersection(setz)
    overlap3 = sorted(list(overlap3))
    print "overlap of x and z:", overlap3
if __name__ == "__main__":
    test()

-------- [snip] -------- [snip] -------------- [snip] -------- [snip] --------------


so silly stuff like that works fine. But i want to do a little more than that. I want to be able to look at a number/item and see which lists it is in so that i could maybe have a master list of all the data, a superset, and then an indication of which lists that data was in, as some items will only be in one list, some will appear in two lists (x & y, or x & z or y & z) and a small handful will be in all three lists.

0 - x
1 - x
2 - x
3 - x
4 - x
5 - x, y
6 - x, y
7 - x, y
8 - x, y, z
9 - x, y, z
10 - y, x

etc.

Of course the whole point of this is that the sets will be more complicated than 0-9, 5-14, and 8-21 and additionally, the sets may not be a list of numbers but eventually a list of strings.

So the steps would be to create the superset
then test for membership for each list?

I kinda get it, the thing that warps my brain is the idea that there are more than 2 lists now to test against.... eventually my script needs to accommodate 4, 5, 6 sets.. but i would just like to see if i can get 3 sets to work first.


</div>

The real question is why bother to make up a new data structure. If you're not careful you'll end up with multiple copies of the same data, and it'll be a pain to keep them in synch. Perhaps all you need is a list of sets, and one or more functions to query that list.

You'll find that checking an item for membership in a set is very quick, so making a separate set of lists (that tells you which ones a given item is in) is probably not productive.

x = range(10)
y = range(5, 15)
z = range(8, 22)
mysets = [(x,"set x"), (y, "set y"), (z, "set z")]      #any number of them

def find_item(item, mysets):
   members = []
   for myset, mysetname in mysets:
       if item in myset:
          members.append(mysetname)
   return members


print find_item(4, mysets), find_item(5, mysets), find_item(9, mysets), find_item(12, mysets), find_item(21, mysets)

DaveA

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